


As Long as I'm with You

by Gampyre



Category: Carry On Series - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, Hair Braiding, Hair Brushing, Hair Washing, M/M, Post-Book 2: Wayward Son, Soft Simon Snow, Soft Tyrannus Basilton "Baz" Pitch, basically this is just an ode to baz's hair, simon may or may not have a butter kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:20:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25246045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gampyre/pseuds/Gampyre
Summary: Baz is stressed, and Simon reminds him what matters most. This is all just really soft.
Relationships: Tyrannus Basilton "Baz" Pitch/Simon Snow
Comments: 22
Kudos: 168
Collections: Carry_On_Summer_Exchange_2020





	As Long as I'm with You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lovelessinmanhattan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelessinmanhattan/gifts).



> Written for [lovelessinmanhattan](https://lovelessinmanhattan.tumblr.com/) for the Carry On Exchange!

_Simon_

The lights are on in our flat when I get back from work, so I know Baz is already home. 

Lately, he’s been leaving for work extra early in the morning so he can get home before me. He likes to spend the time before I get back tidying up or making something for dinner, since Merlin knows I’m shit at that stuff. (Not for lack of trying, but he always ends up re-doing whatever I do.) He says he doesn’t want to spend the evenings and weekends doing housework, when we could be spending time together instead.

Today he’s not in the sitting room where he usually is (reading, always reading). I peek around the corner into the kitchen, but it’s empty. Our dishes from breakfast are sitting in the sink the way they were when I left. Another glance into the sitting room tells me he hasn’t tidied anything up either — the boxes from last night’s takeaway are still on the coffee table where we abandoned them after I kissed him and he practically dragged me to the bedroom. (Our discarded clothes still mark our path down the hallway.)

“Baz?” I call out. “Where are you?”

“Bedroom,” he answers, and his voice is tight. I dump my work bag on the floor, kick off my shoes, and make a beeline for him, slipping and skidding in my socks on the wood floor. I nearly trip over a pair of his jeans.

“Is everything alright, love?”

I lurch forward and shove the bedroom door open to find my fiancé on the floor next to our bed, legs extended in two different directions. His shirt is untucked and as wrinkled as one of mine. He looks up at me with red-rimmed, watery eyes and tugs at his uncharacteristically disheveled hair with one hand. He looks like he lost a fistfight with a particularly potent onion.

“Baz!” I move to drop to my knees in front of him, to touch him, to know that he’s okay, but he throws up his arms to stop me.

“Don’t squash the invitations!” He chides, reaching protectively for the stacks of paper that I definitely hadn’t noticed spread out between his legs. “I am _not_ going to have these reprinted for a fourth time.”

“Oops, sorry. Wasn’t looking. I was more worried about you.” I carefully step over the wedding invitations to sit on the floor beside him, leaning my back against the bed. “Is everything alright? Have you been crying? Did you not feed today?”

Baz picks up a stack of envelopes pre-printed with names and addresses and sorts through them, occasionally pulling one out and setting it aside.

He sighs.

“I’m fine, love. Just frustrated with my family as usual.”

“What’d they do this time? Was it Fiona again?” 

Two weeks ago, Fiona announced that she wanted to bring _two_ plus-ones to our wedding (which is ridiculous — it’s called a plus- _one_ for a reason), and when we said no, she insisted that Nicodemus didn’t count because he’s a vampire, and therefore dead, and therefore not a person. Baz was understandably pissed off about that. He revoked Fiona’s plus-one privileges, and now she has a plus-zero.

“Worse.”

“Worse?”

“My parents insisted that we invite my Aunt Mabel.”

Well, fuck. Baz’s Aunt Mabel is the most obnoxious person I’ve ever met, and that's saying something, seeing as how I went to school with a guy who cast spells by _thrusting_ at people. Mabel is a snobby, petty, vindictive old hag on Baz’s stepmother’s side. I still can’t believe she and Daphne are related — those two are polar opposites in every way possible. And Mabel doesn’t go anywhere without her five bratty children (a pair of egotistical, narcissistic twins followed by a set of truly evil triplets). They ruin _everything_.

“Oh no,” I say.

“Oh, yes.”

“What happens if we refuse?”

“My parents won’t pay for the wedding. Father said that if they’re paying for it, we have to do it the way he wants. And Daphne sided with him, saying it’s a family affair and that since Aunt Mabel is family, she gets an invitation. They refused to hear anything to the contrary.”

“Fuck that,” I say. “Let’s send Aunt Mabel an invitation with the wrong date on it. Wrong location, too. Send her and her foul troupe of gremlins to somewhere awful. Like, oh! Las Vegas in the middle of July. Wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Well, except her, obviously. I _do_ wish that on Aunt Mabel. She deserves it.”

The corner of Baz’s mouth turns up, but it’s neither a smile nor a laugh. He turns his head slightly, suddenly interested in a particular envelope on the other side of him. I reach over and curl two fingers under his chin to turn his head back towards me. His eyes are still a bit moist.

“Baz, love, what’s wrong? It’s not really about Aunt Mabel, is it?”

He sags back against the bed and my hand drops away.

“I hate this,” he says, and kicks at a stack of invitations with his heel. “I despise all of this. I was so terribly naïve to think it would be _fun_ to plan a wedding. I’d rather go back to eating rats than continue attempting to salvage what is inevitably going to be a ghastly fiasco.”

I place a comforting hand on his thigh and nod once at him, encouraging him to continue. Right now he just needs to vent. I’m still not great at communicating with my words, but I do my best to show Baz in other ways that I care about what he’s thinking and feeling. He takes a breath and keeps talking.

“Ninety-five percent of these people are complete strangers to both of us, and of the ones I _do_ know, I don’t even _like_ half of them. I don’t want to have our reception in the fucking club ballroom, but my parents insisted, because at any other venue, we wouldn’t have room to invite all these strangers that I don’t want to see in the first place. I don’t want to start the reception at nine in the evening; I want to have it right after the ceremony so we can get the fuck out of there. But I don’t _want_ to feel like I have to get the fuck out of my own wedding reception. I want it to be something I enjoy. And I really, _really_ , do not want to invite my bitch Aunt Mabel.”

He picks up another stack of envelopes and starts shuffling through them. 

“It’s all wrong,” he says tersely. “I just want to be excited about it, like we were when we got engaged. When I proposed to you, I imagined our wedding would be the happiest day of our lives. But lately it feels like the wedding isn’t even ours anymore. None of _this_ is us" — he gestures at the stacks of paper in front of him — " _This_ is my father’s and Daphne’s wedding. Which is entirely unfair, because they already had one. And they invited every single one of these same people, too.”

He’s gripping the envelopes so tightly that they’re starting to wrinkle.

“Hey,” I say softly. “Why don’t you take a break?”

“I _can’t_ ,” he grumbles. “We need to get the invitations out this week, so people have enough time to respond.”

I snatch the envelopes from him and hold them above my head. He glares at me and reaches for them, but I lean away, keeping them just out of his reach.

“Nope. It’s time for a break. Come on, why don’t you have a bath before dinner?”

He shakes his head a little, but he drops his arm. “Please give me back the envelopes. We really need to get this done tonight.”

“You’ll feel better after having a bath and some food, darling. You know I’m right. Come on, please?”

He relents. He rarely refuses me anything when I call him darling.

  
  


_Baz_

I hate it when Simon’s right, but he knows me too well. Sometimes I think he knows me better than I know myself. I climb stiffly to my feet, wincing at the pain in my shoulder. There’s this one spot just under my shoulder blade where all my stress ends up, and I can never quite manage to get the knot out. I’ll have to ask Simon to help me with it as usual. 

He’s already in the bathroom filling the tub. I stack the envelopes and invitations carefully on the nightstand and grab a set of clean towels before joining him.

I see that he’s turned the water as hot as it will go, just the way I like it, and he’s lined up my shampoos and soaps next to the bath (in the right order, too). He pulls out my favourite scented candles, and I reach around him to light them with a small flame from my hand. 

It’s just like him to be so attentive and considerate. Back at Watford it bothered me that he scrutinised every little thing I did, but it serves to make him an incredible partner. 

I don’t know what I ever did to deserve him.

He turns and grins at me, and I plant a kiss on his forehead.

“See?” He says. “You’re feeling better already, I can tell. Go ahead and get in, it’s almost full and the temperature is just right.”

“Will you join me?”

“Of course, s'why I left my wings spelled. Someone’s got to rub that knot in your shoulder.”

“How did you know I have a knot in my shoulder?”

“You always get that knot in your shoulder when you’re stressed. Go on, get in.”

The water feels divine. I don’t even try to hold back the audible sigh that escapes as I sink into the hot water. I close my eyes and focus on relaxing, on thinking about anything _but_ the wedding. Simon undresses and climbs in the tub behind me, and his hands immediately find my shoulder.

It hurts a bit at first (it’s a truly massive knot today), but as he works his fingers into my back, kneading the offending muscles, the pain dissipates. After ten or fifteen minutes, my shoulder is restored to full mobility. I can breathe more freely, and even my headache has eased up. It feels more like a typical tension headache now, rather than the beginnings of a debilitating migraine.

Simon lifts his hands from my shoulders and I feel his fingers drag through my hair. He tugs my head back a little bit.

“Tilt your head back, darling.”

I obediently tilt my head so he can wet my hair. He reaches for my shampoo and cracks the top open, squeezing a little bit into his hands. He gently massages the soap into my hair. He’s rubbing his fingers in small circles on my scalp, releasing tension I didn’t even know was there. A warm, tingling feeling spreads from the top of my head to the back of my neck and trickles down my spine.

He rinses my hair as gently as he lathered it up. He carefully applies my conditioner just the way I do, starting a couple of inches down from my roots, working the cream in and paying extra attention to the tips. (Unfortunately, there's no good spell for split ends, so I have to rely on Normal methods of hair care.)

Once I’ve been soaped up and massaged and relaxed, and we’ve been in the bath long enough that the water is starting to cool, Simon leans forward and kisses my shoulder, and then my neck. His breath is hot against my skin. I lean into him, my back against his chest.

I reach for my wand to spell the water warm again — I can think of several reasons I'd like to prolong this bath — but he stops me with a hand on my forearm.

“You should go ahead and rinse off,” he says. “You need to eat something. I'm guessing you haven't had dinner yet?"

I shake my head.

"What about lunch?"

My silence is all the answer he needs. More often than not, I can keep my fangs from popping while I eat, but I still tend to avoid eating around my colleagues at lunchtime. We had a lunch meeting today, and I didn’t have a chance to slip away and eat alone.

"I’ll order something for dinner while you’re getting dressed. Join me in the sitting room when you’re done, yeah?”

He towels himself dry and leaves me to rinse off in the shower.

  
  
  


_Simon_

I order Indian food from the place down the street we both like. While I wait for it to arrive and for Baz to get dressed, I wash the dishes and tidy the sitting room. I gather up our clothes and toss them in the hamper. I toss out yesterday's takeaway boxes, replacing them with a pair of clean plates on the coffee table.

Baz is still in the bathroom when the delivery boy arrives, so I tip the kid with some bills from Baz’s wallet and start scooping out food onto our plates. As I’m heating up some blood for him, I hear Baz open the bathroom door and pad down the hall to the bedroom to get dressed.

I eat half of my curry while I wait for him. And then I try a bite of Baz’s biryani. It’s pretty good, so I eat another few bites of it before he comes to join me on the sofa.

I'm reclining in my usual seat — we modified one section of the couch to more comfortably accommodate my wings. The spell has worn off, so I've got them draped over the low back cushion. My tail slides around Baz's leg to grip his thigh as he sinks into the sofa next to me.

He smirks at me. “Are you eating my dinner again?”

“Oh sod off, you know you’re gonna end up giving me half of it anyway. I’m just saving you the trouble.”

“You _are_ trouble, Simon Snow,” he teases. I wink at him.

“You love it.”

“You know I do.”

He sets his plate on his lap and scoops up a bite, and I see his free arm twitch towards his face, but he presses it back down by his side. He’s been trying to break his habit of covering his mouth while he eats. He knows he doesn’t have to hide his fangs from me anymore (I mean, he _should_ know by now how much I like them, what with me practically begging him to bite me every other night), but he spent so much of his life hiding them that he still sometimes does it unconsciously.

I reach over and take his twitchy hand to save him the effort of thinking about it, and he gives me a grateful look.

“Wanna watch something?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I need to eat quickly and finish the invitations.”

“No way.”

He levels his eyes at me. “This is not up for discussion, Snow. They have to get done tonight. As much as I complain about it, we _do_ actually want people to show up, don’t we?”

I shrug. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“What are you saying?”

I shovel my last two bites in my mouth and push the coffee table away, then gesture at the ground in front of me. Baz furrows his eyebrows at me, and I gesture again, more emphatically.

“Sfhit hou,” I tell him.

“What? Swallow your food first, you lummox."

I make a big show of chewing and swallowing as obnoxiously as possible. Baz’s eyes go straight to my throat and linger there. I dunno if that’s a vampire thing or if watching me swallow just really turns him on. Either way, I’m thinking I might be able to convince him to give my throat some special attention later tonight.

“I _said_ , sit down.”

“On the floor?”

“Yes, on the floor. Here.” I toss a pillow down. “Sit on this so your posh arse doesn’t get sore. I’ll play with your hair.”

His eyes light up, and he eagerly plants a kiss to my neck before settling on the ground between my legs, leaning back against the sofa and balancing his plate in his lap. He loves it when I play with his hair.

He continues eating as I slide my fingers through his hair, lifting it from his shoulders and fanning it out across my thighs. He must have spelled it dry after his bath, because it’s perfectly straight and smooth as silk.

I give an experimental tug on it and he sighs. His shoulders visibly relax, dropping at least two or three inches. I tug on his hair again, twisting it around one of my hands and bunching it up in my fist.

“Anyway,” I say. “About what I was saying before.”

“Preventing me from finishing the invitations in time?”

“About people coming to our wedding. Or not coming to our wedding.”

“What about it?”

I separate his hair into three sections. I think I might try making a braid. I’ve watched Penny do it before, and I’ve seen Baz plait his sisters’ hair a few times. I’m sure it would look good on him. (Everything looks good on him.) Plus, once we’re married, his sisters will be my sisters too, and I’d like to be able to do their hair if they ask.

“Well, I was thinking about what you said. Earlier. About the wedding not really being for us?”

“You mean the fact that my father and Daphne have commandeered the entire event and made it all about them?”

I frown at the top of his head. I’ve got two clumps of hair in one hand and one in the other, and I’m not sure what to do next. I think I’m supposed to cross them over each other — but how, exactly? I cross my right hand over my left. Then I try my left hand over my right. Both ways look wrong.

“Yeah. I mean, well, it kinda is, isn’t it? About them?”

This looks nothing like a braid. I drop the strands and untangle his hair with my fingers to start again. Some of it catches in my ring, and I try to gently work it free.

Baz snorts. “Bullshit. This isn’t their marriage, it’s ours.”

Okay. I’ve got three clumps again . . . maybe I should cross them over each other one at a time instead of crossing one over the other two?

“Exactly. But it _is_ kind of their wedding.”

Baz snaps his head around, making me drop the braid again.

"Can you hear yourself? It’s _our_ wedding. Or are you planning to dump me and marry the both of them like some kind of polygamous bride?”

“Stop moving your head.” I tug on his hair until he faces forward again. “I _meant_ , it’s our marriage. I’m marrying you. And you're marrying me. And we’re making these promises to each other, but that’s just the ceremony, you know? That’s not the whole big wedding or the reception. It’s different, isn’t it? Separate? I mean, I know the reception is important to you, so that’s why I’m going along with all this, but if you ask me, I couldn’t give two shits about seating charts or wedding colors or the photographer—”

“You don’t want photographs?”

“Okay, yeah, I want pictures. But just of me and you. I don’t care who else is or isn’t there. Well, I’d also like one of us and Shep and Penny and Aggie. But as long as I’m marrying you, I don’t care about anything else.”

"Not even the cake?"

I smack him playfully upside the head. " _Baz_. Not everything I do has to revolve around food. I like you much more than cake."

"High praise. How do I measure up against scones?"

"I'd still choose you."

"And butter?"

"That's a close one…" I pretend to think about it, and Baz pinches my calf. "Alright, alright! You know I like you better than butter. Now, if you'd ever let me lick butter off of you—"

"Crowley, Snow!"

"It's true though. I mean, not the butter thing. Well, maybe the butter thing. But the thing about me not caring about the details so long as I'm marrying you? That part's definitely true."

“Hmm.”

Baz is quiet for a few moments. He closes his eyes and tilts his head back, relaxing into my lap. I think I’m getting the hang of this plaiting thing. It’s starting to look pretty good if I do say so myself.

  
  


_Baz_

Simon may not have an elegant way with words, but behind his bumbling, fractured phrases and dairy emulsion innuendos, he’s making a lot of sense. I’d been so caught up in trying to plan the perfect wedding that for a moment I lost sight of the most important part.

I’m marrying the love of my life. In forty-three days. 

We’re having most of the ceremony on the grounds of Pitch Manor. The non-magickal parts, anyway, since there’s still an enormous dead spot in Hampshire — shrinking, but enormous nonetheless. The magickal bonding rituals will be conducted just prior to our reception in one of the club's ballrooms. Bunce is flying all the way from America to perform both parts of the ceremony, and her boyfriend Shepard is going to be Simon’s best man (Dev and Niall are mine, of course. I was best man to both of them at their wedding last spring).

We’ve decided to write our own vows; I’ve had mine written for months already. Knowing Simon, I'm sure he hasn’t started on his yet, but he _has_ begun proactively filling out the paperwork he’ll need in order to change his name to Simon Snow Salisbury-Pitch. He never officially changed his name to Salisbury when he discovered the family connection, but now he’s taking my name and his own at once. (We both are. My name is going to be comically long, but I don’t mind the extra syllables if it makes Simon happy.)

He’s completely right.

The wedding and reception are merely a celebration of our commitment to each other. They aren’t the commitment itself.

Truth be told, even the ceremony isn’t that important. We don’t need to read our vows out loud to make them binding. We’ve _already_ made promises to each other. We’ve already sworn to stay by each other through thick and thin, for the rest of our lives. We don’t need a room full of witnesses to validate that.

Merlin, aside from the magickal bonding part, the ceremony doesn't change anything at all! Simon and I still need to stop in at the registry office the day before if we want a legally binding marriage, since the online ordination Bunce got in the States isn’t technically valid in England, so she can’t _actually_ marry us.

We may as well just have Bunce perform the magickal bonding rituals on us in our flat and drive us to the registry office and call it good. I’d be just as happy with that, honestly.

As if Simon is reading my mind, he interrupts my thoughts. “We could always elope, you know.”

“You want to elope?”

He shrugs. I can’t see him, but I can tell because it makes him tug on my hair. (Whatever he’s doing to my hair feels lovely.)

“I didn’t say that. I’m just saying, we could. It's an option. I’d do it if you wanted us to. Like I said, all I care about’s being with you.”

“I’ll consider it,” I say. (I won’t really — I _have_ been dreaming about this wedding for years, and Aunt Mabel or no Aunt Mabel, I've put too much work into it to drop it now — but it’s comforting to remember that we have an out if we want it. That no matter what happens, Simon and I will be together.)

“We could go to Vegas, get married by Elvis. Or by Penny dressed as Elvis,” he suggests.

“ _No_ ,” I vehemently object. “ _Not Vegas._ Anywhere but Vegas.” I’ll be damned if I ever set foot in that city again.

Simon just laughs. “Alright then, not Vegas. If we’re sending Aunt Mabel there, it doesn’t solve our problem anyway. Somewhere else, then… somewhere romantic. What about Paris? Or Rome?”

“We’re going to both Paris and Rome on our honeymoon already, you dolt.”

“So? That just makes it more convenient.”

He’s stopped playing with my hair, and is holding it together at the base of my neck. I tentatively reach a hand up to feel what he’s done with it, and I’m surprised to find that the back of my head has become quite lumpy.

“Love, what have you done to my hair?” 

“Oh!” He leans forward and down so I can see his face. He looks incredibly proud of himself. “I braided it,” he smugly informs me.

“Should I be worried?”

He flushes a little. “I dunno. I mean it’s not perfect, but I think you look good.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. I always look good.”

He shrugs again and smiles sheepishly. “True.” 

I stand up to go take a peek in the bathroom mirror, and Simon follows me, clutching at the end of the plait to keep it from unravelling.

It’s horrendous. Somehow, Simon has managed to turn my previously smooth, straight hair into a knotted, poofy, frizzy rat’s nest. (And believe me, I'm plenty familiar with rats' nests.) I didn’t even know it was possible to make such a _voluminous_ plait with my hair. I look like . . . I look like . . . 

_Oh, Merlin_. I look like my Aunt Mabel.

“Aleister Crowley, Snow! What have you done to my hair?” I gingerly pluck at one of the protruding loops. The end of the strand slips out and falls into my face.

Simon is grinning at me in the mirror. “Told you I braided it! Just like you do for your sisters.”

“This is _nothing_ like what I do for my sisters.”

Simon’s grin slips a little, going lopsided as his face falls. “Do you hate it?”

I fish around in one of the drawers under the sink until I find what I’m looking for. I stretch the elastic out over the fingers of one hand and reach back to take the end of the braid from Simon with the other. I loop the elastic around the end three times to hold it in place.

With our hands freed, I take Simon’s hands in mine and bring them up to my lips.

“I love it,” I murmur against his skin. 

“Really?”

“It’s a terrible mess.”

“But you love it?”

“I do.”

Simon’s smile returns in full force, and he leans in to kiss me. 

“Because we match?”

I reach out and muss up his hair, tugging a few curls in front of his eyes.

“Because we match.”


End file.
